If you are living in the Fairhill area and currently out of work, come along to the Fairhill Jobs Support Project for free and practical job seeking sessions, workshops and training. You will also have access to a computer for job searching.

We at Happy Talk always encourage parents to help develop their children’s interest in books from a young age. Through Happy Talk, crèches and pre-schools have been provided with a range of storybooks and have re-vamped their book areas. Happy Talk has supported them to introduce a Borrow-a-Book scheme – through this scheme, families have a broad range of books to choose from which are suitable for their child’s age, their stage of development and their interest. Happy Talk has developed books around the familiar characters Nibbles and Twitch. These books were beautifully illustrated by Kathy Egan, Pre-school leader at Glenfields Community Childcare.

Cork Early Years Network, an alliance of Early Years Organisations working together and facilitated by Cork City Partnership, held a one day conference on Saturday, 28th September, 2013 at the Gresham Metropole Hotel. The title of the Conference was ‘Aistear into Practice’. The target group was Early Years Practitioners.

The Key note speaker, Arlene Forster, Director of Curriculum and Assessment, National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), spoke to a packed house about the development of Aistear, the Early Years Curriculum Framework for children 0-6 years and the subsequent implementation of the framework around the country through the ‘Aistear in Action’ initiative. The title of the talk was .Aistear: Footsteps, voyages and stories.’

Arlene was followed on by Dr. Geraldine French, author of the Barnardos Publication, ‘Early Speech and Language Matters – Enriching the Communication Environment and Language Development in Early Childhood. Geraldine’s presentation focussed on the links between Aistear and Early Speech and Language, Literacy and Numeracy. She ably put across the idea that implementing Aistear and developing speech and language,literacy and numeracy are

inter-related, work together and do not constitute ‘separate pieces of work and also demonstrated the way in which speech and language, literacy and numeracy in the early years are supported through play activities and throughout the early years curriculum. The interrelatedness of emotional well being, social competence and emerging cognitive abilities and language development was also highlighted by Geraldine.

These informative presentations, assisted by visual aids, were then supported further through the provision of three practical workshops:-

Children as active, capable and competent learners: Supporting Aistear in Action – facilitated by Arlene Forster and Mary Daly (NCCA)

100 participants took part in the Conference and there was a waiting list of 63 plus, which clearly showed the thirst for further supports and information around Aistear, the Early Years Curriculum Framework.

Feedback from participants was very positive with requests to organise further workshops on the subject.